A typical form of vehicle seat with head support mounted thereon comprises a seat portion or squab and a backrest portion with a head support which is mounted to the upper edge of the backrest portion by a suitable form of connecting arrangement. It will be appreciated that, while that is a generally typical basic configuration for a vehicle seat with a head support, there are many different variations on that theme, resulting in a wide range of different structural configurations.
As the head of a seat occupant is usually disposed at a spacing from the head support of the vehicle seat, it has been found that, in particular with collision impact speeds of up to about 15 kph, there is the danger of the occurrence of the injury usually referred to as whiplash trauma involving a shearing loading being applied to individual cervical vertebrae. In order to at least obviate such whiplash injury, it is possible to integrate into the head support of the vehicle seat a structure in the nature of an air bag in order to provide for forward displacement of the head support in relation to the vehicle seat in the event of a collision or impact situation in the tail region of the respective vehicle in which the vehicle seat is fitted. Integrating an arrangement of that kind into the head support however suffers from the disadvantage that the head support is effectively no longer an autonomous or self-contained unit and therefore cannot be easily removed from the backrest of the vehicle seat, or that the shape of the head support is correspondingly influenced or indeed impaired by virtue of the integration of the air bag arrangement.